1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a JPEG2000 coding and/or decoding apparatus and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In present communication circumstance, when a terminal such as personal computer receives relatively large image data, it may take much time to complete receiving the data. Recently, to alleviate such dullness, it is known that it is possible to recognize general image content in the early receiving stages by coding an image data hierarchically in data compression coding at transmitting side and decoding the coded data and reproducing the image data each time the hierarchical coded data is received at receiving side, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2001-218208.
However, in the prior art described above, the resolution of the image obtained in the early receiving stages is generally low, and thus, in many cases, it is not sufficient to allow for reading characters contained in text area while allowing for recognizing a schema of the image area contained in the image data. To accomplish fine readability of characters, it is considered to improve the resolution of the image by keeping reception and decoding of coded data, but in that case, it takes much time and many resources such as memory are required particularly at receiving side.
Furthermore, a technique is known in which an area/areas (image or character area) in image identified by object discrimination analysis is/are extracted from a plurality of images based on data coming from transmitting side and extracted image or character areas are displayed in index form on an image plane at receiving side. In this technique, in general, all of coded data coming from transmitting side is decoded to convert it to image data and each of areas is extracted from the image data. In this case, however, much memory area is needed for processing a plurality of image data and control for the process becomes complicated at receiving side, and thus it is problematic to require much time until all of image or character areas is completely displayed in index form.